Winter Lows
Ev’ry time the waves of tired
Leave me drained and uninspired,
The nagging fear I just can’t shake
Is will I ever get to feel awake ?
Ev’ry time a freeze sets in,
I shiver in my fragile skin,
And all that I can think of then,
Is will I ever be made warm agen ?
The Last of the Bards
Poet Laureates may think they’re minstrels as of old,
And the keepers of collective kinds of culture –
But the power of such poetry has long since faded cold,
Like the tides of sacred dance or idol sculpture.
The heart of our society has moved-on into music
And to movies, and to comics, and to memes –
This is our shared heritage – collectively we choose it,
And subconsciously it permeates our dreams.
The arts have work to do,
And when it’s done,
They must give way.
The world must make anew
Each hero son
To have his day.
And poems, once so true,
Are now unspun, no more to say.
So poetry is rarefied, like opera and heraldry –
Irrelevant to most, and barely missed.
It’s hived-off into enclaves, where its swallows public subsidy
Because a few elites and pseuds persist.
The people are intimidated, left to feel inadequate
For not relating to this ancient form –
But quickly, and quite rightly, shrug it off – so let’s not overstate
Its presence in the psyche of the norm.
From Troy, to Middle Earth, to Tatooine,
The stories sway –
They have to prove their worth,
To keep their sheen,
Or slip away.
And poems, long in dearth,
Are barely seen or heard today.
Dog Tags
The names of dogs shall change and flex,
With the rise and fall of Gus and Rex,
As their names are called around the lido –
Though these days, no-one calls Fido.
Folks in the park are a diverse lot,
And so are their dogs – but none is Spot.
Some names, it seems, are truly over –
Hello Lola, goodbye Rover.
Passing Glances
If eyes are magnets,
We all share a pole,
When pupils meet
With a stranger’s soul –
On a train, in a crowd,
As we sweep and dart,
The moment so quickly
Pings apart.
Our eyes downcast,
And slowly glaze –
We’d sooner avert
Than share a gaze.
We censure our stares,
And apologies,
If our lonely vision
Should meet your eyes.
Bigger Than Jesus
So you’ve formed a band, hey ?
A bunch of like-musicians have joined-forced with each other.
Time to chase that fame
And choose a name
For all of your future fans to discover –
One that sticks in the mind okay,
Yet’s easy to say,
And you won’t be ashamed to tell it your mother.
We’ve all of us kept lists as kids,
Whenever we heard a future name
In a turn-of-phrase or a parlour game.
Well, now it’s time to make your bids,
Set all those quirky titles free –
They may just be your new identity,
For all the times you joked with a whoop
“Now that’s the name of my future group !”
Don’t call yourselves after one of your members,
For therein lies an ego –
I guarantee, of all career-enders,
This is the bitterest blow.
The public assume the namee is the main-man,
Until the members think the same –
And what was a band when you began
Becomes a bunch of sidemen to the Name.
And girls, this doesn’t just apply to the dudes –
So insist you’re a we and an us in interviews.
Now, if it contains three words or four,
It may be a mouthful,
Pretentious bull,
And more manifesto than proper noun –
But it may be distinct and int’resting,
With a definite ring like nothing around.
If so, resist the urge to water it down.
For ev’ry word you unpick from your thread
Is a little less grand and a little more bland,
As if to admit you couldn’t live-up to its stead.
Till you’re just one syllable,
Easily killable,
By keeping-on cutting till there’s nothing to be said.
Yet make sure your moniker sounds like your music –
Don’t play metal in the name of a jazz quartet.
But whatever public-label you pick,
You gotta make it stick
By showing no regret.
Whatever you choose, however you want,
Inscribe it with pride in a well-drawn font.
Before you can even play a note, your brand
Is the first that the world will hear of your band.
It’s just as vital as your onstage-looks,
As your lyrics and your hooks and your tattooed breasts.
Imagine it competing with your rockstar brothers
On your album covers and t-shirt chests,
And your tabloid headlines of drunken arrests.
Will the kids double-take when they see it
From Vietnam to Budapest ?
Inhabit your name – believe it and be it,
It’s what make your music diff’rent from the rest.
Double-Dip Sleep
I’ve heard it often said,
That mediaeval folks would fall asleep
As soon as the Sun went down.
And then they’d rise from bed,
Around twelve or one, as the dark lay deep,
From the peasants to the Crown.
And they’d spend an hour or three
Quite wide awake, with nothing to do,
With the fires and the candles out.
And they’d sit, presumably,
As they’d shiver the midnight through,
Awaiting drowsiness, no doubt.
Relic
The church is dedicated to a saint I’ve never heard of –
To a Supine of Sardinia (or possibly Southend).
A mural might have shown him once, before they scraped the dirt off,
While the stain-glass is a patched-up jumble showing “Christ with Friend”.
A reliquary hold his middle finger, so the wall-plaque claims,
And possibly an eyeball, (though it may have been a sprout.)
I asked the local vicar what his story was, but he just blamed “the heathens”
And said Supine was a martyr to his gout.
The organist was more forthcoming, gushing over miracles –
Like turning water into thirst, or plague into the pox.
He brought a locust back to live by breathing on its spiracles,
And made an old Ionic column weep, and found lost socks.
He even taught a fish to swim, and once out-stared a snail,
And he claimed that worms were demons when they crawled from out the earth.
He went upon crusade – and found, then lost the Holy Grail,
And he prophesised the world would end the year before his birth.
I wondered why no other churches recognised the man ?
Have we all become so cynical, insisting on the proof,
Until we haven’t got the space to celebrate an also-ran ?
Why, the next thing, we’ll demand on prophets only telling truth !
But in the end, he met his fate when challenged on a cliff,
When he said that God gave wings to all those strong in their belief.
And so he died for faith – and just as real as any myth,
Now he’s patron saint of bucket-men, (or possibly false teeth…)
When I wrote this, I thought it was too flippant. So I wrote the fourth verse to give it a bit more weight. However, on reflection it feels like an anti-climax, so I cut it off and present it below:
Relegated Relic
The church is dedicated to a saint I’ve never heard of –
And yet somebody still knows him – and today that’s me, and you.
And there’s plenty more I could have told, and I barely know a third of
All the things that come attached to him, (regardless if they’re true).
And I wonder if they’ll still remember me, a thousand years from now ?
And if they do, what strange, outrageous feats will I perform ?
So raise a prayer to Saint Supine, who made a convert of a cow –
And celebrate the pilgrims who have wandered from the norm.
The Morningstar
It’s a little known fact, but so they tell,
That the Devil loves astronomy.
And when he steps away from Hell,
Away from the caves of his citadel,
With their ceilings of monotony –
Then the one thing that he wants to see
Are stars in infinity.
Is it a part some evil scheme ?,
Or simply that the Devil, as well, can dream ?
I wonder if he can visit them ?
Or can he only gaze from Earth ?
I’m sure he understands each gem,
As much as the Star of Bethlehem,
And over aeons watched their birth
To their glorious end, and brought him mirth
When friendships were in dearth.
Has he lusted for their gleam ?,
Or has he simply been condemned to dream ?
The Bible doesn’t mention much,
Except as signs, or points of light.
Or else, Creation Week and such,
But science there is out of touch –
Like Joshua, needing time to smite,
Commands the Sun to halt its flight –
He knows that that ain’t right !
So is it to score one for his team ?,
Or simply cast away that crutch, and dream ?
There is surprisingly little astronomy in the Bible – there is the basic flat-Earth cosmology which both their smarter neighbours the Persians and the Greeks had already debunked, but not much stargazing it seems. There are numerous references to the Moon, but always in passing – none of them suggest anyone is actually looking at it. Job has mention of Arcturus (or Leo, or Ursa Major), Orion, the Pleiades, and the Chambers of the South (possibly the zodiac, or Centaurus and Crux), but oddly no mention of the very prominent Sirius or Cassiopeia. For a desert culture, you would think that those big skies would feature far more…
Inner Beauty
Skeletons are wonderf’ly spooky,
The freaks that lurk within –
They look both menacing and kooky,
Skinny without the skin.
Skulls with empty orbits,
Missing noses, plenty of chin –
Now freed from the muscles’ corset,
They can flash their toothy grin.
The shoulder-blades hang down behind,
In-front the breastbone juts –
While the ribs are like Venetian blinds,
Or a prison with no guts.
The pelvis is a pair of ears,
To form the butt of our butts,
And the legs and arms are rod and gears –
All held by strings and nuts.
Skeletons are wonderf’ly spooky,
Almost designed to shock –
Though evolution is rather fluky,
And frightens us ad-hoc.
They’ve been the backbone of vertebrates for years,
Our building-block –
So ev’ry October, it’s good to say cheers –
Deep down in our marrow, we rock !
Pareidolia
The world is full of faces,
And especially at night –
In the most mundane of places,
They are popping into sight.
They mean no harm, I quickly wise,
But not before a scare –
All it takes is two dots for the eyes,
And out they stare.
It’s stupid, though, it’s stupid,
And it’s evolution, I expect –
To keep me safe from non-existent phantoms
That my nerves project.
My over-active, pattern-seeking brain
Is wanting to protect –
And here it goes again,
In its pure inventiveness,
As it fashions features out of tree-trunks –
Just in case, I guess.
I know it’s all a trick
Much like those pictures upside down –
A face emerges slick
And makes a gasp out of a frown.
Though most the time, I always find,
It’s just a chance alignment –
All it takes is two dots, then my mind
Provides refinement.
It’s stupid, though, it’s stupid,
And it’s psychologic, I expect –
To root out ghosts in random architecture,
Till my nerves are wrecked.
My overworking, trigger-happy brain
Is so sure it’s correct –
And here it goes again,
With its scatter-shooting strafe,
As it ferrets faces out of shadows –
Just to keep me safe.
Rhyming Couplets 